October 20
2008

"I'm Buffy the vampire lover".
If you've ever wondered how a British women's magazine would approach "adult" fandom activities then look no further. Prepare to be stunned by sentences like "vampire sex has given our supercharged love life a toe-curling boost" and find out the real reason why Buffy and Angel could only just kiss and cuddle.

Um. Okay. Not sure about the parallel universe there, but I'm always good with mind-blowing orgasms. Unless it is happening in said parallel universe and not this one. Which would suck... your blood... oh, behave!

Well, I have always wondered if it's possible to be lower rent than Penthouse letters, so at least that's one question I can tick off. Anyone know why all fire-engines are called Dennis ? It'd be nice to get a twofer.

jcs, I would like to point out the Kevin referenced in that article is not me. gossi, 26, only shares a first name.

That article is absolutely brilliant. From Kevin, 35, the man with a forehead bigger than Dawson Leary (or Joss, for that matter), to the fact the article ends up with a link to their own dating website.. Glorious.

If my wife requests a threesome with "The Count" from Sesame Street and "Count Chocula," is that wrong? Also, which one should I play? I don't think I look good in brown, but I'm not mathematically inclined.

missb, I always thought it was a reference to the supermarket tabloid magazine, not the British tabloid newspaper. I remember getting quite excited at a correct British reference to find it wasn't a British reference at all.

I dunno, I still think Buffy's odd reference to 'The Sun' when talking to Giles probably meant the UK red top rather than a US magazine which it seems pretty unlikely Giles would read (or at least, unlikely he'd let anyone know that he reads ;).

Of course, to a Brit it's pretty (even extremely) unlikely that someone like Giles would read 'The Sun' either but I always just chalked that up to a minor cross-cultural misconception (or even a conscious good natured poke by Buffy at "those wacky Brits" ;).

Well, I dunno either but it's just after Buffy reads 'A child shall be born of man and goat and have two heads, and The First shall speak only in riddles...' that she says it is just like reading the Sun. And that sounds a lot more like the magazine that asked in 1999 if readers were prepared for the Day of Judgement Sun than the "Gotcha" Sun.

Yeah, it's ambiguous but doesn't she also say (roughly) "No wonder you like this stuff ..." (my emphasis) to Giles ? Without a previous reference to the supermarket mag it seems a bit of a non sequitur but as a reference to the British paper it sort of makes sense since at that point (and maybe all through the series) Giles' defining characteristic is that he's a Brit. The "cross-cultural misconception" bit comes in with the idea that folk in the US may hear "tabloid" and think "National Inquirer" and so assume The Sun has similar content.

You may well be right though moley75, could be a "scaffold" scene that set up the fact that Giles reads the magazine for research (or even "research" ;) was cut for time and so you end up with a situation like Mal's "Good answer" to Inara near the end of 'Serenity' which is actually a call back to a previous line from a scene that was cut. We may never know ;).

Hmm, well there's a 'Daily Star' newspaper (I use the term loosely ;) in the UK that's, if anything, even lower rent than The Sun so that fits with that reading (it's often referred to just as 'the Star', in the same way the 'Daily Mirror' - similar idea to The Sun but left leaning - is often just called 'the Mirror').

Unfortunately, there's also a Star magazine that's a similar sort of thing to The Sun magazine (maybe more celebrities than two-headed goat children ;) so i'm not sure if that clears it up or not (the use of 'the' might hint against 'Star' magazine but it's not definitive). Good intel though Capt. Logic, ta ;).

Its funny, I've watched Amends several times and I always thought Buffy was referring to some sort of Heliodivination, sort of like reading tea leaves or entrails. It never occurred to me that she was referring to a tabloid publication.

Given Joss's time in the UK, I firmly believe that Buffy was referring to the UK Sun, to make fun of Giles. If you wanted to reference a US tabloid of that type, The Weekly World News is/was much more iconic than our Sun.